Friday, June 29, 2018

--I grade
many hundreds of tests at a time now, and make mistakes simply because of
the volume. When a student complains, the above is my “go to” excuse for the
alleged error. I correct my error, of course, because I wouldn’t want the
Russians to meddle in a student’s GPA.

While the media
hysteria about “The Russians” has quieted down now, it seems there was nearly a
full year where all the media could do was talk about those “evil” Russians and
their constant “interference” in the US, particularly the Presidential
election.

Curiously missing
in that hysteria was any mention of how the US regularly interferes with
Russia. Even more curiously absent was an explanation why we need to be so
terrified of Russia when today’s Russia is far weaker militarily and
economically than the USSR, which never generated nearly as much hysteria in my
lifetime, even though the latter was also vastly more aggressive (hi
Afghanistan!).

In any event,
many of our ills have been blamed on Russia. One such assignment of blame in
particular was such a standout I’ve waited awhile to see if we could all in
unison get together and point and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Since
that didn’t happen, I guess I’ll highlight it:

I feel the need to
emphasize the above article doesn’t take a moment, not one millisecond, to
consider how utterly preposterous the idea is that Russia would think it’s
remotely cost-effective to influence a country of some 300,000,000 people (who
have absolutely no influence of their government’s foreign policy in any event)
by targeting around 20,000 politically insignificant kids at one educationally
insignificant school in an economically insignificant part of the country.

Numerous reports in the last year have
documented how Russian bots manipulated social media during the 2016
presidential campaign.

From the above propaganda
piece article, and I’d like to slap a big ol’ [citation needed] on it,
because I’ve yet to see any report with a credible argument that “Russian bots”
had even a remotely significant net impact on the election. Yes, I know the
mainstream media told me as much every day, dozens of times, but I’m talking
actual evidence here.

A new journal article in Strategic Studies Quarterly reveals that the Russian
bots had another target in the fall of 2015: students at the University of
Missouri at Columbia.

I’ve covered Mizzou a
few times, starting well before the Presidential election, and they’ve
had “race issues” as far back as 2010. The reason for the continuing
problems, as any chucklehead can identify, is our “leaders” in higher education
keep caving in to violent protesters’ unreasonable demands, which only leads to
further protests. If they just got rid of the violent protesters, and
restricted campus to just students, they could fix their problems.

Complicating
the situation is that racial tensions were quite real at Mizzou that fall, and
real threats did exist. But the article documents how the false reports
contributed to considerable fear on campus. In fact, the Russian bots avoided
detection in part because the hashtag #PrayforMizzou was used by real people
who were at the university or were concerned about it, as well as by those
forwarding the bot-created tweets.

Racial
hoaxes are everyday incidents in higher ed, so common that even the
campus papers don’t always find them worth covering. To date these hoaxes are
invariably tracked back to actual people committing them (because bots can’t
spray graffiti or make fake nooses, or whatever). The “research” fails to address how bot activity explains incidents from a time when the bots
didn’t exist, but let’s gloss over that.

Prier writes that there was plenty of
evidence -- for those looking -- that the tweets that spread were false. He
cites the tweeting and retweeting patterns, consistent with other Russian bot
efforts. "The plot was smoothly executed and evaded the algorithms Twitter
designed to catch bot tweeting, mainly because the Mizzou hashtag was being
used outside of that attack," he writes. "The narrative was set as
the trend was hijacked, and the hoax was underway."

“For those
looking”? The concept here is called “confirmation bias.” What are these
patterns? Can anything else have these patterns? Do we have absolute
confirmation that Russian bots in general exist? Do we have a motive here? Do
we have evidence that people really can be incited to violence over a Tweet?
I’m not saying the hoax didn’t happen but…our media instigates such hoaxes on a
regular basis, and I really think they’re more influential than a Tweet.

Had anyone done a search of Google images
for "bruised black child," the image that was included in the false
tweet would have come up -- an image showing a child who had been beaten up by
police, but a year prior in Ohio.

Oh no, a picture
was taken out of context, and used to push an agenda. Um…doesn’t our mainstream
media do this on a regular basis? Even if alleged Russian Bots are affecting a
few thousand kids, our known media regularly misleads hundreds of millions. The
hypocrisy here is a bit thick, no?

And I still think
we should have some real evidence that it’s “the Russians” here, because “it
acts like something that we’ve defined to be acting like a Russian bot” is a
pretty circular way of finding a Russian bot.

The explanation given in his endnote for the
#PrayforMizzou case isn't very strong. He didn't match any Twitter accounts to
Russian bot accounts, only what he believed were bot accounts and matching his
groupings of tweets to the modus
operandi of later Russian bot-type Twitter influence campaigns. I'm
not entirely sure I buy it as a Russian influence campaign.

I’m glad the media
is finally done with “The Russians” hoax, but I see many people fell for the
“Trump’s separating children” hoax. I can take some time to wonder what will be
the next hoax the mainstream media will push on the public, but I won’t waste
time wondering if people will fall for it, I know the answer there.

Similarly, I
won’t waste time thinking “The Russians” are behind the next hoax I hear on the
news.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

There’s a big
divide between the administrative and faculty caste on campus nowadays. Your
typical faculty will interact with admin1 on only a few occasions:
hiring, firing, and when a student complains. The gentle reader will note that
all three situations involve money: when you’re taking money out of admin
pockets, when you’ll stop doing that, and when you’re threating the possibility
of more money going into admin pockets.

The guys at the
top live in their own little bubble, and, besides money, not much can penetrate
it. They’ve given themselves splendiferous titles, huge salaries, and the
trappings of intellectualism, of academia…but they generally don’t have
anything like the latter two in reality. They also grant themselves awards for
their “bold leadership,” and give themselves many an uproarious round of
applause for Vision for
Excellence plans.

I suspect the
gentle reader doesn’t know about “Vision for Excellence,” so a quick overview.
Basically, these are incredibly self-aggrandizing plans for “excellence,” which ultimately is just growth for the institution. These plans can run hundreds of pages
long, and are completely rewritten every few years, with the previous plan, no
matter how magnificent they declare it to be, utterly abandoned. All this
plan-making takes up huge amounts of time, but that’s not a problem as our
schools are hugely overstaffed with administrators desperate to find a way to
spend all that student loan money the faculty help bring in.

Vision for
Excellence isn’t the only way admin waste their time on campus, of course.
There are grandiose new “student as customer” initiatives to follow,
pretentious “industrial partnerization” presentations, and let’s not forget the
pompous Diversity Enhancement programs as well. I must confess: I consulted a
thesaurus for the previous sentence, faking a level of diction I do not truly
possess.

I make this
admission because it relates to the latest craze our leaders have begun in
higher ed: “Design Thinking.” Even my own little fake community college, some 6
years ago, had the deanlings dress up in “agents of change” outfits for
photo-ops because of this fad.

What, pray tell
is Design Thinking and who are agents of change? The title of a recent article
describes it well enough:

The student loan scam,
where schools can charge infinitely large amounts of money for infinitesimally
little education, has clearly warped the minds of our leaders in higher ed…$12,600
for a four day “bootcamp”? This could only happen after years of our leaders noticing
that it doesn’t matter what crap is in the classes, they can charge whatever
they want. So now they’re charging yearly tuition-level prices for less than a
week of “education.”

What exactly is
Design Thinking supposed to do?

It "fosters creative confidence and pushes
students beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines." It
equips students "with a methodology for producing reliably innovative
results in any field." It’s the general system for change-agent genius we’ve
all been waiting for.

It’s been a long
time since I’ve mentioned the special language (“edu-babble”) that our leaders
devolve into when discussing their latest crap innovative idea.
Basically, they use this language whenever they’re pushing something into higher
education ultimately to put more money in their pockets. The uninitiated hear
all the long words and figure they’re listening to someone smarter than
themselves but, having taken the time to parse the language, I assure you: it’s
a laughable method of covering up how they’ve got nothing to say.

So, how does this
magical Design Thinking process work?

"It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few
easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human
Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’
‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration.’" He explains further
that these seven points can be reduced to what are known as the five
"modes": "Empathize," "Define,"
"Ideate," "Prototype," and "Test."

So, are there 7
principles, or 5? Because you’re simply making stuff up here, it doesn’t
matter, of course. The important thing is to declare how brilliant you are at
it, and admin have that part down.

Just because you’ve
broken something up into arbitrary categories doesn’t mean you’ve discovered
great wisdom. The other wondrous example of this in Education is Bloom’s Taxonomy, a
completely evidence-free approach to education which has done nothing for
education despite it being used for over 50 years now.

Hey, remember a
few paragraphs ago where I created the illusion of greater literacy than I have
by simply changing some words around? It’s the same idea here:

Here are the
design-thinking "modes" juxtaposed with some rules I was taught in a
freshman writing class in 1998:

Test Mode: Give What You’ve Written to Someone You
Trust to Read It and Tell You if It Sucks

Bottom line,
Design Thinking is just the same stuff we’ve already been doing, but we use
different words to describe the stuff.

And charge
$12,600 for a four day workshop covering the material on one page of a freshman
English textbook you can buy used for $10. Brilliant!

In the
end, design thinking is not about design. It’s not about the liberal arts. It’s
not about innovation in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not about
"social innovation" if that means significant social change. It’s
about commercialization. It’s about
making education a superficial form of business training.

It’s also about
setting up new fiefdoms on campus, filled with “Agents of Change” promising
more visions for excellence…just as long as the new Design Thinking Institute
on campus has at least half a dozen new Vice Presidents of Design Thinking,
each paid at least six figures. And what do these VPs do for the campus?

“…change
agents do on their campuses, beyond recruiting other people to "the
movement." A blog post titled "Only
Students Could Have This Kind of Impact" describes how in 2012 the TEDx student representatives
at Wake Forest University had done such a good job assembling an audience for
their event that it was hard to see how others would match it the next year.
But, good news, the 2013 students were "killing it!" "*THIS* is
Why We Believe Students Can Change the World," the blog announced…”

They give talks
and then announce how amazingly successful the talks were…since they live in a
bubble, there’s nobody to tell them how their activities are utterly irrelevant
and insipid. This stuff has been going on in higher education for close to a
decade now. I bet not one person in the country can identify a single new idea,
new change, brought about by Design Thinking.

And yet we’ll
keep pouring more money into this abysmal concept, even though there’s nothing
here that we didn’t already learn our first week in a basic writing course.

The article spends a
long time taking down this new fad in higher ed, but bottom line, it’s
just another boondoggle, paid for by the student loan scam. End that scam, and
we can fix this problem, like so many others in higher ed, quickly.

1. There are
also mandatory meetings where faculty and admin are in the same room, but this
does not count as “interaction” as faculty are understood to simply nod and
applaud whatever admin wants to force down faculty throats.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

It truly is
astonishing how common the racism and sexism is on campus today. Oh, our
leaders prattle on about diversity and equality, but it takes little effort to
discover they don’t know the meanings of these words.

In times past,
they did know what the words meant…but being racists and sexists themselves,
they made sure to advance racist and sexist policies in a covert way. So, there
was no written policy about hiring, but you better believe most (probably
every) campus in this country gave priority hiring to females and “protected
minorities” as they were called. I don’t make this claim lightly, as every
hiring committee I’ve been on used the gender or race of the applicant as part
of the decision making process, stinking “equal opportunity employer” notices
be damned. We’d put the equal opportunity notice in writing to be sure, but
there were many unwritten policies we used.

It was all done
with a wink and a nod in the past, but bottom line today’s administrators and
faculty aren’t nearly so clever as before, and certainly not clever enough to
do things with a wink and a nod. So, now we have documented job applications for
physicists or university
admin which are clearly racist and/or sexist (particularly against
whites), even math faculty positions
requiring specific political views (social
justice warriors only).

Now, obviously,
this behavior is still wrong, and eventually someone in admin with half a brain
shows up (takes a while) and points that you can’t be so blatant, and knows that
you can’t make such behavior as written policy. It’s all wink and a nod, you
know.

Time and again we
get to see this stuff in writing, particularly racist stuff, but today we’ll
focus on the blatant, and very common, sexism on campus:

Isn’t it
interesting how this stuff never seems to hit the mainstream news? Anyway,
let’s see what prompted the professor to set up a sexist grading policy:

…he wanted to “test the water” to see if this approach could
“attract female students into future classes” and help correct chronic gender
imbalances in his field…

It’s only one
sentence, but it says much about the madness infecting higher ed right now.

First, this “test
the water” thing. I’ve been forced to listen to, and adopt, so many cockamamie,
clearly stupid ideas that I actually see the professor’s thinking here. Most of
these ideas are so obviously bad, so lacking anything to do with education,
that absolutely, “screw it, let’s just give higher grades to the females” makes
sense in this context. I mean, it’s not like integrity or decency ever seems to
get in the way of ideas, time and again I’ve seen admin propose new policies which
could only come from a depraved mind.

Second, the
“attract female students” thing. Again, I’ve been bombarded time and again with
programs to attract female students, and, again, never has integrity been a
factor in any of those programs. So, again, I see the professor’s point: “let’s
just flat out promise females better grades” seems like perfectly good bribery,
little different than, say, a missionary murdering all the adults in a village
just so he can claim credit for taking care of many orphans. Honest, higher ed
is just that messed up now that this sort of deranged thinking is consistent
with other ideas in higher ed.

Finally, the
“chronic gender imbalances” thing. Again, this concept was hammered into my
skull many times when I was at questionable schools. I couldn’t ask questions
there, but this is my blog, so I will ask three obvious questions: “Who says
the imbalance is a bad thing?,” “Why will the world be a better place if we
change the imbalance?,” and “Do we have any evidence what balance would be
optimal, so that we can even say there’s an imbalance now?” These questions are
never, ever, asked in higher ed, or if they are you can’t hear them over the
endless shouting to fix the gender imbalance.

What kind of
imbalance are we looking at here, anyway?

…classes have “one or two female students” on average
in a class of 20 to 30, and they are “not doing well,” he told The
Fix in an email. These women will probably have to “repeat the courses
or leave the program” without a grade boost…

It always turned my stomach when admin
would heap praise upon some faculty for “successfully passing” (I still hear
the voice saying that abominable phrase in my head) some female or protected
minority. Truth be told, I’d sometimes get that praise as well; it still turned
my stomach. I passed, and pass, students because they demonstrate they
understand the material, their genitals or skin color have nothing to do with
it, not that admin sees much beyond race and gender.

Of course, I’m
not a racist or sexist like your typical college administrator, so they saw
nothing offensive about praising me for passing people of certain races or
genders. But I always felt uncomfortable with such praise, and am grateful to
no longer be at a place where I must be subjected to it.

To the school’s
credit, they stepped in and stopped the professor from overtly giving female students better grades just for being female:

…the University of Akron “follows both the law and its
policies and does not discriminate on the basis of sex,” and that Liu “has been
advised accordingly, and he has reaffirmed his commitment to adhering to these
strict standards.”

So, yes, in
writing, the university here will follow the law but…the professor’s policy
didn’t happen in a vacuum. He didn’t wake up one day and say “We need for
females passing my courses and this must be done in any way possible, integrity
is not a factor here.” He got a memo with that directive.

I assure the
gentle reader, the professor was told many times how important it was to get
more females in his classes. He was also told many times how important it was
that females get better grades in classes. He saw with his own eyes that
academic integrity was of no concern to how any administrative policy could be
fulfilled.

He saw it so
often that, much like my examples in the beginning of the article, he was under
the impression that sexism favoring females was perfectly legal, possibly even
moral, and so he adopted the kind of policy admin was telling him to adopt.

His mistake was
putting that policy in writing. But, I’m sure now that admin has spoken (not
written!) to him, he’ll do that sort of thing with a wink a nod.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

The whole point of
a university is to include the entire universe of ideas. It seems noble enough,
but what happens when you allow people in whose ideas don’t allow any other
ideas in? The seed for the takeover was planted decades ago when it was decided
letting such people in was nevertheless part of the university mission.

Eventually, you
get a lockdown. It’s not a fast process, mind you, but as these people with
exclusionary ideas put their chokehold on campus, it accelerates. Past a
certain point (namely, control of the hiring committees), the only people who
can become faculty must hold those ideas, and nothing else.

And so it is that
we now have campuses drowning in ideology, more importantly, drowning in
exactly one ideology. How bad is it?

How clear is it
that there must be bias in the hiring process at these schools? Our schools
scream about how much they want diversity…but as far as hiring goes, there is
to be no diversity in political views. It is worth noting that even at the
schools which may have some Republicans…they’re pretty rare.

Looking at the
statistics further, we get more interesting details, but first let us consider
the data set:

They removed all the adjuncts and temp workers from the
data, for good reason. The majority of college professors are adjuncts today,
with minimal pay and no benefits. You can spend a decade or more as an adjunct,
and if you make any waves (and God forbid you have a pro-Trump bumper
sticker…), you’re gone. These poor adjuncts aren’t about to interrupt the
ideological narrative being instilled in the students, so it’s fair to look at
just the full-time tenure track faculty.

He also excluded 101
professors—a little more than one percent of the total sample

—from the
analysis, because they were registered as members of minor parties (cue big-L
libertarian weeping).

Our “two
party” system is ridiculously corrupted at this point. My entire life it seems
my only choices from the two big parties in a Presidential election are either
the candidate for “massive debts, huge social programs, and endless war” or the
candidate for “massive debts, endless war, and huge social programs.” There are
other parties, and allow me to at least mention the Libertarian party, which
thinks you should be allowed to keep your money, believes it’s far better for
you to take care of yourself, and understands that murder is bad—basically
diametrically opposed in every way to the only two parties you can
realistically choose from in any election.

Throwing out
these “weird” third parties from the study is a little unfair but, seeing as
that’s how alternative political parties are treated everywhere else, I guess
I’ll overlook it here.

While there
is a definite Democrat bias on campus, there are some exceptions in certain
departments:

…the hard sciences—engineering, chemistry, physics, and
mathematics—had more even ratios of Democrats to Republicans…

It’s “almost”
curious that Republicans are often described as Bible-thumping, science-denying
ignorant rubes, while the data from our campuses indicates that if you’re in a
discipline which requires scientific thought and respects empirical evidence, you’re
vastly more likely to be Republican. I put the “almost” in quotes because those
offensive descriptions of Republicans are being provided by the media…which in
turn is predominantly Democrat (incidentally, there are many hysterical videos
on YouTube watching these media guys lose their minds at the outcome of the
last Presidential election, and I encourage the gentle reader to watch a few,
to see just how strong the bias evidently is).

Hmm, a few of those departments have the reputation
of being academic slums. I’m rather surprised Education isn’t here, but the
study is focusing on the higher tier schools, which probably don’t have
Education departments.

…could not find a single Republican with an
"exclusive appointment" to gender studies, Africana studies, or peace
studies.

I’ve never even heard of “peace studies.” In
any event, we clearly are seeing a trend as far as the most disreputable
departments also being the most filled with Democrats. It’s funny, our
metropolitan areas most controlled by Democrats also have a vile reputation.
Hmm.

Now there are some small schools with a
number of Republican faculty, but they tend to be religious or military
schools. You can’t shout “ah ha!” here, because while it’s trivial to find
schools which are exclusively Democrat schools, there are no schools with
exclusively Republican faculty. It’s almost as though one side actually
believes in diversity, while the other only uses it as a tool to grab power.

Overall, the bottom line is a student
can easily go his entire college education without exposure to any non-Democrat
ideas:

…around 78 percent of departments did not contain a
single full-time professor who identifies as Republican.

As I’ve said
before, once a school becomes converged, controlled by this particular set of
political beliefs, the only quick solution is bulldozers. This solution is not
on the table, of course, and so instead these schools will die a slow death, as
they invariably get a reputation for race riots and, more importantly, extreme
indoctrination at the expense of all education. People don’t want to go to such
schools, much less go deep into debt for the privilege of doing so.

Will these
schools take all of higher education down with them? I hope not, but at this
point I can’t be certain.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

Soaring tuition costs are forcing people
to reconsider going to university, but we still have this ingrained belief that
you need a “4 year degree” to get a good job.

Community colleges, the “cheapo” option
of higher education, are starting to satisfy this need. Hey, I’m all for lower
tuition, so I should be for this even though I’m justifiably quite hard on community
colleges. Heck, if some clown offered 4 year degrees out of his garage I’d be
ok with giving him a fair shake, but the government has something of a
chokehold on how degrees are granted, so that’s not an option, alas.

Now we have community colleges in many
states granting 4 year degrees. While this does somewhat make one wonder why
bother with universities, the responses to this new phenomenon really highlight
just how incompetent our “leaders” in higher education are:

What kind of degrees are being offered now
at a CC? The above article cites an example:

Starting in fall 2019, students at Ohio’s Sinclair Community
College will be able to enroll in a four-year degree program in unmanned aerial
systems…

Hey that sounds nice, until you realize that “unmanned aerial systems”
means “drones.” This new technology is pretty amazing. I can absolutely see
someone studying 4 years to learn how to make these tiny flying machines. Is
that what they learn here?

None of that sounds like their students will learn how to build drones.
That’s a shame. Instead, they’ll learn how to operate them.

Um…they sell these things in stores. The laws are covered on an insert
in the box, a quarter page of text, as are maintenance instructions. Seriously,
everything you could need to know about maintenance you can master in a few
hours at most. “Mission planning”? C’mon now, even the most advanced military
drones don’t require years of training to figure out how to plan a mission.

Does this even remotely sound like enough material to require 4 YEARS of
training? I know, there’s an “and more” there, but I just don’t understand why
it didn’t occur to the admin at the CC that they could fill all this material
into a 3 month course and probably have 11 weeks left over. You can join the
military and be flying and maintaining the most advanced drones on the planet
in less than 4 years, after all.

Bottom line, it’s clear they’re just taking some fad people will sign up
for, and slapped together a program stretched out to maximize the revenue from
the student loans.

A nearby university offers something more involved:

Just up the road, Youngstown State University offers a
somewhat similar four-year degree, in mechanical engineering technology — but
tuition there is double Sinclair’s.

I rather suspect the graduates of the engineering program know quite a
bit more than how to fly a drone anyone can buy for a few bucks. It really is
striking that community college couldn’t strip out the harder material, just
offer a 2 year program in drone operation, and call it a day.

Our leaders in higher education have Ph.D.’s in “Leadership Curriculum”
and other strange fields…it seems like they could have come up with something
better than the university, instead of just changing the words around, hacking
off the hard material, and lowering the price.

Halving the price while stripping the content, while still taking just
as many years, doesn’t strike me as much of an achievement. Simply lowering the
price by half under these circumstances just doesn’t cut it.

Other places do better with different 4 year degrees:

…will have spent about $2,000 a year to go to the community
college. Tuition and fees at Loma Linda cost more than $33,000 a year, according
to College Factual, a website that tracks college costs…

That said, a 90% reduction in price, while an extreme example,
illustrates that there really is room for improvement in our “4 year degree”
programs already on offer at universities.

In California, 15 community
colleges offer bachelor’s degrees in health and technology subjects such as
biomanufacturing and health information management. In Georgia, students at
two-year schools can get their bachelor’s in nonprofit management and
respiratory therapy.

One California student, Elvia Esquer, is a mother of two
college-age children who has worked as a medical coder for 22 years near her
home in San Diego. She is going to a community college, San Diego Mesa College,
to get her bachelor’s in health information management.

Perhaps I’m just picking on the Ohio CC, as it’s clear other community
colleges are offering 4 year programs on topics more advanced than what an
interested hobbyist can learn in an afternoon.

Now, universities aren’t happy at all with this muscling in on their
territory, but listening to their shrill protestations really highlights what
higher education today is all about:

“We live in a state with limited resources for higher
education,” Youngstown State’s provost, Martin Abraham, said. “We’re
continuously cutting back — not increasing funding — for higher ed. It doesn’t
make a lot of sense to set up a competing system for the same set of funds.”

--hey, at least his title isn’t twice as long as his name,
that’s quite the rarity.

Wow, they’re continuously cutting back? How did student loan debt get to
over 1.5 trillion dollars, then? Why is tuition perpetually rising? Why does
nobody else ask these questions when this Provost spouts these talking points?

“There’s a reason the tuition structure is different at a
four-year university versus a two-year university,” Abraham said. For example,
he said, Youngstown State’s career fair attracts 70 companies to campus every
year...

Aren’t the schools in the same state supposed to be on the same team,
with a shared mission of educating the state’s citizens to create a more
powerful state? That’s what they say, but it’s clear the provost doesn’t
believe any of this, instead he sees a problem with an upstart competitor who
can offer the same product for much less.

If this supposed educator was really on a mission to help people in his
state, he’d invite the community college graduates to the job fair as well,
right? The state schools really are on the same team and should help each other
out, and providing employers with more candidates would be a plus as well. But
the provost sees none of this, and only fears a competitor endangering his
(overpriced) monopoly.

I assure the gentle reader, this provost isn’t the only admin in higher
ed so incompetent he has no idea what his job actually is.

He continues his display of total confusion:

“That’s economy of scale.
It drives up the cost of our education,…

(pause for laughter)

I can’t make this stuff up. Our leaders in higher education honestly
think “economy of scale” means the price per unit should go higher as you
increase in size. This is the kind of idiocy you learn when you get an
administrative Ph.D.

To illustrate my point that this provost isn’t alone in his total
confusion, the article quotes another utterly clueless leader:

And C. Todd Jones, president and general counsel of the
Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Ohio, said the argument
that baccalaureate degrees are unaffordable is a “red herring.”

"Financial assistance makes degrees affordable,
particularly for low-income individuals in our state," he said. There's no
reason in terms of costs for creating a community college baccalaureate degree,
he said.

How do you even find someone this ignorant
to be president of an administrative association? Seriously, anyone with even
vague knowledge of higher ed knows student loan debt is insane right now, that
“financial assistance” is mostly a trap into perpetual debt servitude,
especially for low income individuals.

This dude actually thinks there’s “no reason
in terms of costs”? Again, I couldn’t imagine this level of stupidity if I
tried. If community colleges can offer the same thing for half the price, this
in and of itself is a reason. What’s *wrong* with our system that it chooses
leaders who can’t understand this basic idea?

The gentle reader should keep this in
mind when he sees another tuition increase, because our education system really
is ruled by people who think “we’re bigger, so it’s economical to cost more”
and “customers see no benefit to having a lower price.”